The future of aerial warfare will look a lot like a science fiction movie.

The U.S. Air Force has just announced that it plans on firing a 100-plus-kilowatt laser from a small jet fighter plane by 2022.

As reported by Breaking Defense, the weapon will be modestly built into an external weapons pod. The U.S. military is preparing to equip most of its branches with this laser technology, and there is a real possibility that this laser technology could be employed in combat within the next seven years.

Morley Stone, the Air Force Research Laboratory’s chief technology officer, described the development and eventual execution of the laser plans as a kind of crawl-walk-run approach.

Speaking to the press on Thursday, Stone said that “before we start getting into really what we consider a lot of risk with internal carriage integration, we’re going to look at external integration via a pod.”

Dr. David Hardy, of the Air Force Research Laboratory, has a way of demystifying the whole thing saying, “A laser is basically a heating device.”

“It heats up something. It melts holes in it. That’s what we do,” Hardy explains.

Over the years, in their quest to perfect their new weapon, the military has abandoned the chemical lasers previously used on the Airborne Laser (ABL) program. But they have taken much from the experience of building ABL, and learned important lessons that apply to the more compact electrically-powered lasers currently being used.

As Hardy explains: “Making ABL work was not just fitting the laser in: It was building the beam control system, it was building the pointing system, it was building the targeting.”

“We learned a lot from that,” Hardy added.

The Navy has already successfully tested a similar laser of lower power aboard USS Ponce last year and plans to install a more powerful weapon soon for continued testing.